Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great American author, once noted that in comparison to Shakespeare “the world of men has not his equal to show. ” However, when he looked at the man, the “jovial actor and manager,” he claimed he “cannot marry this fact to his verse. ” Doubts of the true identity of William Shakespeare have plagued men and women such as Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Sigmund Freud, Delia Bacon, and many others. The known facts of Shakespeare’s life and career are few. It is probable, although not certain, that Shakespeare had a grammar school education in Stratford.
The documents left from his life refer mostly to business affairs of which he had many and barely touch upon his acting career. In his will he does not mention books or manuscripts or any such item that would show him to be a literary man. At a time when eulogies for great men were very popular, Shakespeare’s death was marked by a peculiar silence. Mark Twain was also a critic of William Shakespeare’s work. He said: So far as anybody actually knows and can prove, Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon never wrote a play in his life. So far as anybody knows and can prove he never wrote a letter to anybody in his life.
So far as any one knows, he received only one letter during his life. So far as anyone can know and can prove, Shakespeare of Stratford wrote only one poem during his life. This one is authentic. He did write that one–a fact, which stands undisputed; he wrote the whole of it; he wrote the whole of it out of his own head. He commanded that this work of art to be engraved upon his tomb, and he was obeyed. There it abides to this day. This is it: Good frend for Iesus sake forbeare to digg the dust encloased heare! Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones And curst be he yt moves my bones.
Puzzled scholars, enthusiasts, and readers find it hard to believe this man, a moneylender and grain merchant, could be responsible for producing several major works of English literature. As more have become convinced that the actor from Stratford could not have written the great masterpieces, many candidates to the literary throne of Shakespeare have been suggested and supported. Sir Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, was the first man to be offered as the “real” Shakespeare. Many learned scholars agreed that the plays contained legal references and terms with which a lay man such as Shakespeare would not have been familiar.
Lawyers declare that the author must take rank among the greatest of lawyers, and must have been learned not only in the theory of law, but also intimately acquainted with its forensic practice (Durning-Lawrence 74). ” Elizabethan society was also in a ‘craze’ for the Law. Dramatists and poets, in the interest of attracting an audience, included many legal references in their works (Gibson 53). Strong ambition led Bacon to pursue a legal career that, as Gibson notes, he came to dislike. Consequently, Bacon rarely used legal references in his known works.
Baconians also rely on the use of cryptograms to prove Bacon is the true Shakespeare. One such revealing puzzle comes from the long word ‘honorificabilitudinitatibus’ found in Loves Labour’s Lost. The letters of this word can be rearranged to form the sentence ‘hi ludi F. Baconis nati tuiti orbi’ which is translated ‘these plays F. Bacon’s offspring are preserved for the world’ (Durning-Lawrence 94). By giving each letter a value between 1 and 24 (A=1, B=2, etc. with I and J and U and V counting as the same letter), a numerical value of 287 is assigned to the word.
In the anagram sentence, the sum of the initial and terminal letters for the words total 136, and the remaining letters add up to 151. When the first collection of Shakespeare’s work, the First Folio, appeared in 1623, the twenty-seven letter word appeared on page 136 on line 27 as the 151st word printed on the page (Durning-Lawrence 92-4). By assigning a numerical value of 33 to Bacon’s name, we find on line 33 of the same page the line, “What is Ab speld backward with the horn on his head? ” The reply in the following line is “Ba most seely sheepe, with a horne: you hear his learning.
Had the reply been properly phrased in Latin, the word for horn is cornu making the real answer “Ba corn-u fool” (Durning-Lawrence 95). Bacon’s supporters assert that these were intentional devices of the author to reveal his identity to future generations. Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, has come the closest to being credited with the works of Shakespeare. “Oxford’s reputation as a playwright is attested to by a number of his contemporaries, including Francis Meres, and it is noteworthy that among all the dramatists Meres praises. Oxford is the only playwright whose plays are and for whom not even a title survives.
Oxford possesses the knowledge and experiences the ‘true Shakespeare’ shows in his work. By the age of 16 Oxford had earned degrees from both Cambridge and Oxford University and began a law study one year later. His education exposed him to law, music, foreign languages, and the classics. As an aristocrat he was intimately familiar with courtly customs and pastimes. Botany is one subject dealt with knowledgeably in the plays that Oxford had experience within his life. He was a ward of Lord Burghley at the time the Lord employed the leading horticulturist to care for the extensive gardens of the estate (Whalen 92).
Events and characters from the plays and sonnets exhibit remarkable similarity to Oxford’s life. Hamlet, for example, contains the greatest number of such parallels. Oxford’s relationship with his mother can be seen in this play where Hamlet laments his mother’s remarriage to a man of lower status. The rest of the works are notable in that none have caring mothers who display genuine affection for their children (Whalen 108). Problems with the Oxford case arise from the fact that he died in 1604, before many of the plays were thought to be published.
Oxfordians claim that dating methods are not precise. The evidence used to date many of the plays does not give a definite date of publication. Another objection to Edward de Vere is that his known verse does not match the standards of Shakespeare, a claim well refuted by the Oxfordians. “Venus and Adonis,” Shakespeare’s first published poem, is written in six-line pentameter stanzas. The same form of stanza appears in Oxford’s verse but occurs almost nowhere else during the 16th century. Other scholars have drawn numerous parallels between the writings of Shakespeare and Oxford.
Today, Oxford is the predominant candidate for Shakespeare. Several court trials held in the United States in recent years have come close to awarding victory to Oxford, but the Stratford man continues to win. Christopher Marlowe is another contemporary of Shakespeare that many have tried to credit with the works. Men such as Calvin Hoffman have noted several parallelisms and similarities in the writing of Shakespeare and Marlowe. Hoffman claims his parallelisms show readers “‘the verdict must be that the plays and poems of these two authors were written by the same person” (118).
For example, the line “Who ever loved that loved not at first sight” is found both in Marlowe’s Hero and Leander and Shakespeare’s As You Like It (Hoffman 120). Dr. T. C. Mendenhall created a procedure for determining peculiarities of style for an author. By taking a lengthy passage from an author’s work and counting the number of words with three, four, five, etc. letters, a line graph can be drawn that shows the inherent style of the author (103). Shakespeare’s work was compared with the work of other contemporary authors including Christopher Marlowe.
When Mendenhall graphed each author, Marlowe’s graph matched the graph of Shakespeare “about as well as Shakespeare agrees with himself” (108). Marlowe’s style does show many marked similarities to Shakespeare, but unfortunately he died in 1593 before any of Shakespeare’s works had been printed. Supporters of Marlowe claim that his death was an elaborate plot to escape troubles in England. Thomas Kyd, a former roommate of Marlowe, had been imprisoned and charged with atheism, a very serious charge at that time. Under torture, Kyd ‘revealed’ that the atheistic documents found in his papers had been written by Marlowe (Heilbroner 129).
Faced with the serious threat of imprisonment, torture and death, Calvin Hoffman theorized that Marlowe and his friend Thomas Walsingham devised a means of escape. On May 30, 1593, Marlowe traveled to the seaport town of Deptford with three men, Ingram Frizer, Nicholas Skeres, and Robert Poley, of bad reputations whom Walsingham employed. After spending the day together, they retired to the house of Dame Bull. An argument began between Frizer and Marlowe ending in a deadly defensive blow to Marlowe. Church officials quickly laid Marlowe to rest in an unmarked grave (Heilbroner129-31).
Hoffman believes that an innocent man, such as a foreign sailor, was killed and substituted for Marlowe. Marlowe escaped punishment and, since he was presumed to be dead, adopted the pen name William Shakespeare to continue his writing. Walsingham used the actor from Stratford as a “front man” to publish Marlowe’s manuscripts. Walsingham remembered a scribe, who may have been responsible for recopying the manuscripts, in his will (Heilbroner132). Many scholars have found Marlowe’s escape too outrageous and unnecessary to be authentic, so few are left that support his claim.